THE GOVERNMENT has begun cutting leave entitlements for new staff appointed to top-level posts in the Civil Service.
Annual leave arrangements for a new assistant secretary post in the Department of Health, which was advertised earlier this month, are set at 30 days a year.
Leave entitlements for existing assistant secretaries are set at 33 days a year.
The move is expected to form part of a new standardisation of leave across the public service which will, in essence, see a two-tier arrangement put in place.
In future there will be one level of leave entitlements for serving personnel and another for newly appointed or newly promoted personnel.
However, leave entitlements for some existing staff are expected to be cut back as part of the standardisation move.
A review of the arrangement in the public service, under way since early last summer, is likely to set out “bands” covering maximum and minimum leave for grades of serving and new staff.
The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform said last week that the review of leave arrangements was ongoing. Asked about the new 30-day leave arrangement for the assistant secretary post in the Department of Health advertised last week, it said only that the “advertisement sets out the entitlement”.
Some sources have suggested that the new bands of leave could run from 22 to 32 days for existing personnel and from 20 to 30 days for new staff, although these figures have not been confirmed.
The move to introduce standardised arrangements follows the controversy this year over leave for local authority managers, where some had up to 42 days each year, and the rejection by an arbitration board of changes to traditional privilege days – additional days off on top of annual leave – for civil servants proposed by the Department of Finance.
Following the controversy, county managers said they would back the introduction of an official limit of 32 days on their leave.
Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin has said leave arrangements had “grown like topsy” in the public service.
He said that in local authorities, days off for fairs and traditional events had been incorporated into mainstream leave.
Some of the additional annual leave arrangements in local authorities also stemmed from local deals several years ago to “buy out” staff entitlements to have days off to mark church holidays.
